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A Brief History of Voice Recognition Software

Voice recognition and speech recognition as the ability of computers to respond to spoken commands, has been a dream for many engineers since the dawn of the computer age. Over the past 20 years or so, there have been many great advances in the realm of voice recognition, none of which have amounted to a marketable product. However, in the last few years there has been an increasingly significant advance in voice recognition software lead by one of the largest software companies, and certainly the most well known, Microsoft. These advances have been implemented in Microsoft's latest Vista operating system. Previous to these and other similar advances, the scope of voice recognition has been limited to a simple automated telephone system. The automated telephone systems can reach a high accuracy because the probability of a certain word being spoken as a response to a question is very limited and defined, i.e. "yes" and "no," most likely prompted by such a question.

I know many of you "in the know" and even those of you who simply pay attention to the news, have seen Microsoft fumble at the unveiling of such products. Microsoft's previous voice recognition systems have been simply dismissed by the power and popularity of other more specified products. But don't let that hinder your curiosity of what a multi-billion dollar company can achieve in an operating system. We're here to tell you that Vista's voice recognition software, Vista Speech, has to be taken more seriously.

What Most People Do, and What We Can Do

Many people begin their transcription needs with hiring an in house transcriptionist for their business. With the advent of Voice recognition software in conjunction with digital media, businesses have slowly been changing with the times. We no longer have the need to pay the outrageous prices for a transcriptionist or a transcription service. There are plenty of digital options out there, some which cost much more than others, so why not utilize the one that you already have in your possession? Windows Microsoft Vista is now up to speed with voice recognition software and we can use it to it's full extent by simply adding a third party developed vocabulary for our Medical and Legal transcription needs! Trigram Technologies has developed a comprehensive vocabulary and database based on dynamic contiuous speech recognition. Basically, they've compiled thousands of specialty specific medical and legal transcriptions, and adapted them to voice and speech patterns in irder to enhance accuracy and usability for the end user.